Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. Their way to keep trump out of the trial. Abc news reports that prosecutors have been coaching their witnesses not to mention trumps name or even that manafort lives in trump tower. The judge in the case has warned that bringing up manaforts ties to trump could unduly influence jurors. There is at least one thing about this trial that is important to the relationship between Paul Manafort and donald trump. The first witness today was tad devine, chief strategist for Bernie Sanders an president ial campaign who worked with manafort on political campaigns in ukraine. The prosecution called him as their first witness to have him describe how much work manafort was doing in ukraine and how lucrative it was. Before we came on the air, we got a rush version of the transcript from todays hearing. Im not going to be able to act out a whole conversation but heres one little bit of the prosecutors Opening Statement worth hear. Th
said i think in september of 2017 on this network if you were looking for a russian plant, if you were looking for agent to plant on the trump campaign, paul manafort would be your guy. there s really no such thing as coincidence in law enforcement. it s remarkable that we have paul manafort who is millions of dollars in debt to the russian oligarch oleg deripaska, suddenly he shows up despite ta debt and volunteers to work for free on the trump campaign. and then during his tenure, he offers to brief deripaska on what s going on. this is a remarkable string of coincidences and i think jeremy s analysis from pretty far out will be accurate at the end of the day. so we could see this case come together certainly the special counsel team hopes that manafort will become available to them as a witness. i m sure that they would prefer to have him decide to cooperate with them. but at the end of the day, even